238 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTRAL INDIA 



" Tiger-shooting commences " will be entered in the Indian 

 almanack ol the future, when the royal animal shall be 

 preserved in the Reserved Forests of Central India to 

 furnish sport for the nobility of the land ! 



Poor old Lalla ! He fell a victim in the end to con- 

 tempt of tigers, bred of undue familiarity. I was very 

 ill with fever, and meditating a trip home, and had sent 

 out the Lalla with a double gun to shoot some birds for 

 their feathers with a view to salmon flies. He came upon 

 the tracks of a tiger, and, contrary to all orders, tied out 

 a calf at night as a bait, and sat over it in a tree with the 

 gun. The tigress came and received his bullet in the thigh, 

 going ofi wounded into a very thick cover in the bed of a 

 river. The plucky but foolish Lalla followed her in there the 

 next morning by the blood ; but soon found that tracking 

 up a wounded tiger with a gun is a very different thing 

 from following about uninjured tigers without intent to 

 disturb them. Before he had gone a dozen paces the 

 tigress was upon him, his unfired gun dashed from his 

 hands and buried for half its length in the sand, his turban 

 cufied from his head to the top of a high tree by a stroke 

 of her paw that narrowly missed his head, and himself 

 down below the furious beast, and being slowly chewed 

 from shoulder to ankle. He was brought in a dozen miles 

 to Khandwa, where I was, by some men who had gone in 

 for him when the tigress left him. The fixe of dehrium 

 was then in his eye, and he raved of the tiger's form passing 

 before him, red and bloody. But he recognised me when 

 I came to him, and conjured me to go out forthwith and 

 bring in her body next day if I wished to see him live. I 

 knew that the natives have a superstition to this efEect; 

 and, though I was then in a high fever, I sent off my elephant 

 at midnight to a village near the spot, following myself on 

 horseback at daybreak. Much rain had fallen, and all old 

 tracks were obhterated. The jungle was also very green 

 and thick, and I spent the whole day till the afternoon, 

 hunting, as I afterwards fotmd, in a wrong direction. At 

 last I came on a fresh trail, with one hind-foot dragging in 

 the sand, and then I knew I was near the savage brute. 

 We ran it up to a dense jaman cover in the river-bed, and 



